The people who know Leon McFadden well would say it’s just like him to do something so kind, something so unlike his image as a tenacious football player who revels in the game’s violence.

When San Diego State’s much decorated senior cornerback goes home to Inglewood, he makes an extra stop in the neighborhood to pay his respects to the mother and grandmother of one of his best friends from St. John Bosco High, Keith Price.

It doesn’t matter that Price is the dangerously talented quarterback for the Washington team that will host the Aztecs on Saturday in the season opener. Or that McFadden and Price have gone so far to put their game faces on that they haven’t spoken to each other in several months.

This is about more than football. It’s family.

“They came to my games all last year when Keith didn’t have games,” McFadden said. “Our families are really close.”

That is McFadden: An athlete who plays on a virtual island in head coach Rocky Long’s gambling defense, but is far from being a selfish loner.

After a second straight season of making the All-Mountain West first team, McFadden enters his final college year with a locker room full of accolades, from appearing on the Bronko Nagurski Trophy Watch for the nation’s top defender to being named the “Best Cover Corner” in the country by Lindy’s.

But away from the field he carries himself as if he’s just another guy doing his job.

“The thing about Leon is he’s soft-spoken; he’s humble; he’s a team guy,’ Long said. “If they cover man-to-man, I don’t care if they’re brash. They can be as brash as they want to be if they can cover.

“But I would much rather be around the ones that are team guys and not brash, and Leon is as easygoing and as laid back as there’s ever been, and he covers them just fine.”

Humility came at an early age for McFadden. His father, Leon, played professional baseball in the Houston Astros organization and didn’t let his kid get an overblown view of himself when he coached him in Little League.

“It’s the way I was brought up,” McFadden said. “I wasn’t a loud talker. I was a humble guy. I went out there and worked hard like everybody else. My parents harped on that a lot.”

McFadden is the rare player who was able to make the steep jump from high school to plenty of playing time in his true freshman season. Long’s defense is like football’s calculus to learn, but McFadden is an honor student with it now. He’s played in 38 games total, making five interceptions, and last year he broke up 15 passes – the third-best single-season total in Aztecs history.

“He’s fast, he’s quick; his reflexes are acute,” fellow senior cornerback Josh Wade. “He goes out every week with a chip on his shoulder and he’s very competitive. So when you get that kind of mixture in a player, you know there’s greatness.”